7 - The Stones of Kilcolman: Spenserian Biography, the Ruin, and the Material Fragment

Summary

All that in this world is great or gaie,

Doth as a vapour vanish, and decaie.

Edmund Spenser, ‘The Ruines of Time’, lines 55–56

In a self-confessedly whimsical footnote in their book, Ireland: Its Scenery, Character, &c. (1841), beneath a passage describing Spenser's former residence at Kilcolman Castle and the lands around it, Mr and Mrs Samuel Carter Hall write that they were once riding in a carriage between Dunbrody and Wexford, in which they ‘had been […] speculating on the possibility of some happy chance enabling us to enrich the world by finding these “lost books” in some sequestered nook’. These lost books, they explain, are the concluding six books of The Faerie Queene, believed to have been destroyed in the fire that consumed Kilcolman in 1598, but also rumoured, or so they say, to have survived, and indeed to have passed recently through the hands of one Captain Garrett Nagle. The driver of the carriage, overhearing their discussion, makes a remark that seems straight out of the jokebook about the rustic bumpkin. ‘“I know the man that has 'em”’, he says. ‘We eagerly asked, “Who? where?” “Oh bedad, sir, I know the man that has 'em; he lives at Ballyhack, and has thim and the pinny magazine – both”’. The joke is not just on the Irish driver, of course; it exposes a certain absurd optimism in the Halls' dream of recovering the lost manuscript of The Faerie Queene, as well as the lost six books of the second half of the poem.